Webmaster Forum / Flash / Flash Site Design / August 2008

I am planning a 4 tabbed panel design for a web app. The whole web app is in
Flash. I am coding in Actionscript 3.

When clicking on a tab, you see a different panel-screen view. Each panel view
has a number of different input components; input textfields, combobox dropdown
menus, etc. Only the 4 tab panel buttons would always remain visible to switch
to another panel view.

Here is my question. What is the best way to show, and then, hide the panels
as they are requested? Since there are 4 panels, 3 will always be hidden at one
time, the browser will only see the one selected panel at any given time.

I would like to do this all on the first frame only of my .fla file. I also
have a document class Actionscript file for all my coding. As there are many
input fields and other input components on each panel, I would like to be able
to see them visually, so they can be organized and lined up visually on the
main timeline (verses using AddChild and not being able to them in Flash). Do I
create 4 movieclips (panel1, panel2, panel3, panel4, and use the movieclip's
visibility property to show/activate and hide/deactivate them? Or is there a
preferred method to accomplish this design goal?

Any AS3 rough coding examples showing how I would navigate between my panels
would be appreciated.